The 10 Coolest Open-Source Software Tools Of 2020 (So Far)

These 10 open-source projects are leading the industry toward greater adoption of agile development and DevOps methods, artificial intelligence, cloud-native architecture, and advanced security.

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The open-source movement continues to be a revolutionary force in the IT landscape by enabling rapid innovation and ensuring the critical technologies that result from it remain agnostic, affordable and accessible.

With cloud adoption accelerating, the collaborative efforts of diverse development communities— name-brand vendors, innovative startups, nonprofit foundations and independent coders—are more essential than ever for building the cutting-edge tools needed to develop and power modern workloads.

The following open-source projects are leading the industry toward greater adoption of agile development and DevOps methods, artificial intelligence, cloud-native architecture, and advanced security.

Allegro Trains

Allegro Trains, developed by Israeli startup Allegro.AI, is an open-source solution for managing machine- learning projects.

Trains offers a complete AI DevOps package that supports experiment tracking, analysis, reproducibility, comparison, tuning, automation and storage maintenance.

Data science teams use Trains to collaborate when training machine-learning and deep learning models. Allegro characterizes its ML-Ops technology as “automagical” integration.

Envoy

Envoy has become a staple in the cloud-native ecosystem.

Lyft engineers first developed the network proxy, but since it moved to, and later graduated from, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, adoption has soared across almost every large web services provider.

Envoy provides crucial service mesh capabilities, including service discovery, load balancing, logging and tracing, for modern service-oriented architectures. With service traffic flowing through an Envoy mesh, it becomes easier to detect problems, tune performance and add features.

Helm

Helm, an open-source package manager that recently graduated from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, sees more than 2 million downloads a month.

Helm Charts, the project’s packaging format, have become the go-to method by which infrastructure operations teams define, install, upgrade and manage applications running in Kubernetes orchestrated environments.

K3s

K3s delivers container orchestration to resource-constrained environments.

The extremely lightweight but fully compliant Kubernetes distribution was created to run cloud-native workloads in IoT devices at the network’s edge.

Developed by innovative container startup Rancher Labs, K3s is packaged in a binary smaller than 40 MB that’s designed to simplify installation and updates and reduce dependencies.

Kubei Container Runtime Scanner

Portshift developed and open-sourced this container scanner that identifies and helps remediate application vulnerabilities during runtime.

With Kubei, DevOps teams get an operational view of Kubernetes pods as the software scans deployed images for security flaws and identifies the components of a cluster that need to be patched to ensure safe operations.

Because it observes running pods, the Kubei scanner doesn’t need to be integrated with a CI/CD pipeline or image registry.

Linkerd

Linkerd, a lightweight service mesh for Kubernetes, focuses on maintaining tight security and reliability while delivering granular observability into cloud-native workloads.

The software is designed to measure and manipulate traffic across micro-services without ramping latency. Developers don’t have to change their application code to use Linkerd telemetry features to optimize and debug their applications.

The latest Linkerd release introduced a multicluster extension allowing users to securely connect the service mesh between Kubernetes clusters across any network topology.

OpenSCAP

This compliance assessment tool is enabling developers to apply cloud-native methods to mission-critical and regulated workloads requiring continuous auditing.

OpenSCAP, which enforces the Security and Content Automation Protocol standard, monitors risk, helps ensure newly discovered vulnerabilities are quickly patched and governance policies are kept up to date. It delivers compliance scanning and automated reports directly into DevOps pipelines.

OpenWhisk

With serverless computing all the rage, the OpenWhisk project has delivered a distributed platform for executing functions at any scale.

Developers write their functional logic, called Actions, and set the events that trigger them from external feeds or HTTP requests. OpenWhisk manages the infrastructure, servers and scaling.

The project delivers tooling to support packaging, catalog services and multiple container deployment options.

Prometheus

Prometheus has become a go-to tool for developers looking to add event monitoring and alerting into their containerized applications.

First developed for the SoundCloud music sharing platform, the technology made its way into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, from which it graduated in 2018.

Prometheus, which collects data in a time series and provides its own query language to retrieve it, is now widely integrated into major tech platforms and adopted by some of the largest online services providers.

Swim Platform

SWIM.AI open-sourced the Swim platform last year, offering developers an integrated solution for building distributed applications that analyze data and learn in real time.

The platform, which takes advantage of the WARP protocol for bidirectional streaming, provides for its own persistence, messaging, scheduling, clustering, replication, introspection and security. It optimizes available compute resources and processes data locally without need of a database, message broker or application server.

The Swim platform simplifies building applications that can make intelligent decisions based on data rapidly streaming in from edge devices.